Stage Production 2018 - A tribute to our founder on the year she passed away.

Stage production 2015 - The last production with our founder present.

Bibliography

Written by Sherling de la PazArtistic Director of PAMANA ng LuzViMindaOctober 2015

Leticia Bulotano-Wheeler is the epitome of a selfless, community-oriented visionary with a driven mission at heart. Although born and raised in the Philippines, Leticia has spent the majority of her adult life in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is from here that she has consistently pushed boundaries in the realm of cultural intangible heritage for more awareness and more recognition.

Leticia attributes her mission of cultural preservation and representation to the learnings of her childhood. Growing up on the island of Mindanao, one of the cultural powerhouses of the Philippines,1 she was surrounded by vibrant and colourful customs and traditions. Moreover, Leticia is following in the footsteps of her mother, who she describes as being an avid storyteller dynamically recounting colourful traditional stories at every family gathering. Leticia’s mother instilled in her a deep-seeded national pride that she considered to be not only her individual birthright, but also the result of the collective experience of a shared culture.

With this worldview, Leticia has lived in Montreal for over forty years, extending a profound influence on how generations of young Filipino-Canadians view their own cultural identities. Throughout the decades, she has invested heavily in the creation of different cultural dance groups: Kalayaan Dance Troupe (which would later change its name to Filipiniana Dance Company, the first ever Canada-based dance group to represent the Philippines in an international CIOFF2 festival), Kalinangan Dance Troupe, Salinggawi Philippine Arts Organization, and finally PAMANA ng LuzViMinda. Through these dance companies Leticia has been able to foster Canada-based Filipino youth and instil in them the importance of their parents’ customs and traditions.

Leticia’s influence in the realm of cultural intangible heritage has expanded beyond the limits of the Filipino community in Montreal, however. Her active involvement in CIOFF and FCI has brought greater visibility to the ethnic communities of the migrant diaspora within North America. She has been at the forefront in getting North America-based multicultural groups to be recognized and to participate on the international level. For cultural groups seeking to travel, “Leticia Bulotano-Wheeler” is a household name. ​ Despite her national reputation for demanding “quality over quantity,” Leticia is affectionately known as “Tita Lettie” to PAMANA. Her love of the culture, her high demand for utmost professionalism, and her unwavering faith in the capabilities and potential of the youth are indelibly ingrained in the thread of PAMANA’s tapestry.